Gilead, Gala­pa­gos clear an­oth­er PhII hur­dle for fil­go­tinib, but can they hope to catch up with No­var­tis’ Cosen­tyx?

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

Gilead and Gala­pa­gos have cleared an­oth­er hur­dle in a broad-rang­ing pro­gram to ad­vance fil­go­tinib in­to the mar­ket as a block­buster can­di­date. But this lat­est achieve­ment still leaves them way be­hind a surg­ing No­var­tis in a packed field of ri­vals.

Walid Abi-Saab

Re­searchers say that the drug hit clear­ly pos­i­tive end­points for mod­er­ate to se­vere ac­tive anky­los­ing spondyli­tis. That in­cludes the pri­ma­ry end­point, which took a look at a dis­ease ac­tiv­i­ty score at week 12. There they saw a drop from base­line of 1.5 com­pared to 0.6 for the con­trol arm. There was al­so a 76% ASAS20 re­sponse for the drug arm com­pared to 40% in the place­bo group.

Gilead picked up rights to fil­go­tinib af­ter Ab­b­Vie aban­doned it to pur­sue their in-house pro­gram for a ri­val drug. They’re all play­ing catch-up to No­var­tis’ Cosen­tyx, which has grabbed a slate of ap­provals as they move their IL-17 drug through the chess board of in­di­ca­tions, in­clud­ing anky­los­ing spondyli­tis, plaque pso­ri­a­sis and pso­ri­at­ic arthri­tis. And the Gilead/Gala­pa­gos team is in a mas­sive Phase III pro­gram for au­toim­mune dis­eases af­ter hit­ting their marks in a range of mid-stage stud­ies like this.

This is not just a mar­ket wait­ing to hap­pen, though.

No­var­tis re­cent­ly launched a head-to-head AS study of its Cosen­tyx against their biosim­i­lar, the grand­dad­dy of the big bi­o­log­ics. The phar­ma gi­ant al­so re­cent­ly launched a pi­lot study on the bone health of anky­los­ing spondyli­tis as they move to pro­tect the fran­chise — part of a broad rang­ing ef­fort to go big with this block­buster.

The crowd­ed au­toim­mune field al­so in­cludes Eli Lil­ly’s Taltz, Siliq from the biotech for­mer­ly known as Valeant, Dupix­ent from Sanofi and J&J and guselkum­ab from J&J.

“We are ex­cit­ed to see that fil­go­tinib showed strong ac­tiv­i­ty across a wide range of pa­ra­me­ters rel­e­vant for anky­los­ing spondyli­tis and was well tol­er­at­ed in TOR­TU­GA, which re­in­forces pre­vi­ous find­ings about the ac­tiv­i­ty and tol­er­a­bil­i­ty pro­file of fil­go­tinib in mul­ti­ple in­flam­ma­to­ry con­di­tions,” said Walid Abi-Saab, the chief med­ical of­fi­cer at Gala­pa­gos.

Jason Mast

Associate Editor

Legend Biotech, the Nanjing-based CAR-T developer, has raised $424 million on NASDAQ. The biotech had originally filed for a still-hefty $350 million, based on a range of $18-$20, but managed to fetch $23 per share, allowing them to well-eclipse the massive raises from companies like Allogene, Juno, Galapagos, though they’ll still fall a few dollars short of Moderna’s record-setting $600 million raise from 2018.

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Is a pow­er­house Mer­ck team prepar­ing to leap past Roche — and leave Gilead and Bris­tol My­ers be­hind — in the race to TIG­IT dom­i­na­tion?

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

Roche caused quite a stir at ASCO with its first look at some positive — but not so impressive — data for their combination of Tecentriq with their anti-TIGIT drug tiragolumab. But some analysts believe that Merck is positioned to make a bid — soon — for the lead in the race to a second-wave combo immuno-oncology approach with its own ambitious early-stage program tied to a dominant Keytruda.

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As it hap­pened: A bid­ding war for an an­tibi­ot­ic mak­er in a mar­ket that has rav­aged its peers

Natalie Grover

Reporter

In a bewildering twist to the long-suffering market for antibiotics — there has actually been a bidding war for an antibiotic company: Tetraphase.

It all started back in March, when the maker of Xerava (an FDA approved therapy for complicated intra-abdominal infections) said it had received an offer from AcelRx for an all-stock deal valued at $14.4 million.

The offer was well-timed. Xerava was approved in 2018, four years after Tetraphase posted its first batch of pivotal trial data, and sales were nowhere near where they needed to be in order for the company to keep its head above water.

Recursion Pharmaceuticals

Salt Lake City, UT

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

Lonza chairman Albert Baehny took his time headhunting a new CEO for the company, making it absolutely clear he wanted a Big Pharma or biotech CEO with a good long track record in the business for the top spot. In the end, he went with the gold standard, turning to Roche’s ranks to recruit Pierre-Alain Ruffieux for the job.

Ruffieux, a member of the pharma leadership team at Roche, spent close to 5 years at the company. But like a small army of manufacturing execs, he gained much of his experience at the other Big Pharma in Basel, remaining at Novartis for 12 years before expanding his horizons.

Natalie Grover

Reporter

Amber Tong

Editor

Jason Mast

Associate Editor

Another Big Pharma is entering the Covid-19 antibody hunt.

AbbVie has announced a collaboration with the Netherlands’ Utrecht University and Erasmus Medical Center and the Chinese-Dutch biotech Harbour Biomed to develop a neutralizing antibody that can treat Covid-19. The antibody, called 47D11, was discovered by AbbVie’s three partners, and AbbVie will support early preclinical work, while preparing for later preclinical and clinical development. Researchers described the antibody in Nature Communicationslast month.

Pfiz­er’s Doug Gior­dano has $500M — and some ad­vice — to of­fer a cer­tain breed of 'break­through' biotech

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

So let’s say you’re running a cutting-edge, clinical-stage biotech, probably public, but not necessarily so, which could see some big advantages teaming up with some marquee researchers, picking up say $50 million to $75 million dollars in a non-threatening minority equity investment that could take you to the next level.

Doug Giordano might have some thoughts on how that could work out.

The SVP of business development at the pharma giant has helped forge a new fund called the Pfizer Breakthrough Growth Initiative. And he has $500 million of Pfizer’s money to put behind 7 to 10 — or so — biotech stocks that fit that general description.

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Can a small biotech suc­cess­ful­ly tack­le an Ever­est climb like Alzheimer’s? Athi­ra has $85M and some in­flu­en­tial back­ers ready to give it a shot

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

There haven’t been a lot of big venture rounds for biotech companies looking to run a Phase II study in Alzheimer’s.

The field has been a disaster over the past decade. Amyloid didn’t pan out as a target — going down in a litany of Phase III failures — and is now making its last stand at Biogen. Tau is a comer, but when you look around and all you see is destruction, the idea of backing a startup trying to find complex cocktails to swing the course of this devilishly complicated memory-wasting disease would daunt the pluckiest investors.

New York, NY

GSK presents case to ex­pand use of its lu­pus drug in pa­tients with kid­ney dis­ease, but the field is evolv­ing. How long will the mo­nop­oly last?

Natalie Grover

Reporter

In 2011, GlaxoSmithKline’s Benlysta became the first biologic to win approval for lupus patients. Nine years on, the British drugmaker has unveiled detailed positive results from a study testing the drug in lupus patients with associated kidney disease — a post-marketing requirement from the initial FDA approval.

Lupus is a drug developer’s nightmare. In the last six decades, there has been just one FDA approval (Benlysta), with the field resembling a graveyard in recent years with a string of failures including UCB and Biogen’s late-stage flop, as well as defeats in Xencor and Sanofi’s programs. One of the main reasons the success has eluded researchers is because lupus, akin to cancer, is not just one disease — it really is a disease of many diseases, noted Al Roy, executive director of Lupus Clinical Investigators Network, an initiative of New York-based Lupus Research Alliance that claims it is the world’s leading private funder of lupus research, in an interview.

UP­DAT­ED: Es­ti­mat­ing a US price tag of $5K per course, remde­sivir is set to make bil­lions for Gilead, says key an­a­lyst

Natalie Grover

Reporter

Data on remdesivir — the first drug shown to benefit Covid-19 patients in a randomized, controlled trial setting — may be murky, but its maker Gilead could reap billions from the sales of the failed Ebola therapy, according to an estimate by a prominent Wall Street analyst. However, the forecast, which is based on a $5,000-per-course US price tag, triggered the ire of one top drug price expert.

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